AI-Enabled Tools
An NSF-funded human-centered design project building tools, with online workers, that help them market themselves, find good work, and get credit for it — technology designed to complement people rather than replace them.
Associate Professor
Department of Management and Business
Skidmore College
Michael Dunn
I am a scholar of work whose research examines how technological change is reshaping work, and what that transformation means for workers, organizations, and the institutions of employment.
My scholarship pursues a single broad question: how does technological change reshape work — its organization, its quality, and its distribution — and with what consequences for workers and organizations? I pursue that question empirically and over time. The empirical core of this work is a longitudinal study of digitally mediated careers, comprising two strands: one follows knowledge workers as the digital systems they depend on reshape how labor is found and priced, and the other designs tools, with those workers, intended to complement rather than displace them. Related streams examine the organizations founders build within digital infrastructure and, most recently, how workers are learning to use — and to compete with — AI-enabled systems.
Current Projects
Digital Workers at the AI Edge
Online freelancers are among the first workers to both use and compete with AI. A new panel study of how they adopt AI-enabled systems, where those systems help them or threaten their work, and how workers and systems change together over time.
Transactional Careers
A longitudinal panel of online knowledge workers followed since 2019 — more than 450 interviews — tracing how careers, identities, and livelihoods take shape when work is bought and sold through digital platforms.
Digital Entrepreneurship
Interviews with founders who built agencies inside Upwork, examining how digital infrastructure shapes entrepreneurial orientation, founder skills, and organizational form.